There is a lot of potential for gamification in low motivation, low engagement jobs, says Rajat Paharia, who is widely regarded as the founder of gamificationSurabhi Agarwal&Priyanka Sangani | ET Bureau | February 15, 2016, 09:21 IST

There is a lot of potential for gamification in low motivation, low engagement jobs, says Rajat Paharia, who is widely regarded as the founder of gamification and is the founder of Bunchball, a Silicon Valley startup which provides products targeted to increase employee engagement as well as improve customer loyalty.

In an interview with ET's Surabhi Agarwal and Priyanka Sangani, Paharia explains how gamification can solve problems not only in the corporate sector but also in social sector. Edited excerpts:

How does gamification make boring things interesting?

It's all about turning things from 'I have to' to 'I want to' by using these data driven motivational techniques that video game designers figured out 40 years ago.

They were effectively living in the future. So we are taking all that and applying it to the world of business. So whether you want sales people to sell more new products, employees to share and collaborate more, you want people to go through training quickly and with better efficacy...it can be done with these techniques.

Which are the areas where it finds the most use?

I think there is tremendous potential for what's called the hourly workforce, people working in retail, restaurants, housekeeping staff. People who are in high turn, low motivation, low engagement jobs and how to make their jobs much more interesting.

With multiple platforms such as CRM, ERP, IT helpdesk, etc, companies have a view of the employees that they never had before. This 360 degree view is going to enable a whole new way of how you treat those employees.

You can do profiling, look at who are my top employees, who are my bottom employees, and then you build ideal profiles that you can build as interview templates, what am I looking for, predictive analytics, there is so much stuff that you can do with such data.

What social problems can gamification can help solve?

We have a lot of edutech and fintech startups using our stuff. There is tremendous potential in these areas. The government is a segment we haven't even touched, but there is so much you can do. There is military, government interacting with citizens...you can use gamification and drive the interactions to a new level.